Month: February 2013

You see it in the movies. You fear it yourself (if you are smart). You fear it in general since it’s big brother perfectly demonstrated. What am I talking about? Clearly as the title implies
I’m talking about cell phone tracking.

But you know what? I think that it’s not as easy as you think to cellphone track someone. Of course, technically it’s easy but imagine for a second that you’re a law enforcement agent and you knew that John Smith was doing something bad and you wanted to track him. What would you do?

You’d inquire at all the cellphone providers maybe and ask : “John Smith, do you have his location?”. Each provider (Verizon, ATT, etc) will say : “Which one?” and if you don’t have any other info you’re screwed. If you do then maybe you can identify the person you are looking for. Then you need to go to court and get a court order to track it.

But what if the persons phone is paid for by their work? Can you be tracked then?

Anyway, the more you think about this, the more you can come up with ideas to make it even harder for them. I came up with two of them:

1) Form a corporation and have the corporation buy a few phones and use one of them. I would guess a court would have a hard time agreeing to trace all phones of a corporation as opposed to a single individual. Furthermore the law enforcement people would have to know that you started the corporation. Would they be digging that deep if they needed you right away? Could they? I don’t think so.

2) Find a friend who wants the same cellphone and plan that you have and both of you get your contracts and phones and then trade them with each other. Cops looking for person A, even if they can ID them will be following/finding person B and you have no billing issues since you and your friend are paying the same amounts each month.